Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2025)
This article extends social realist theorising about theoretical knowledge and curriculum within the sociology of education to explore the nature of qualifications. The article draws on Bernstein’s concept of evaluative rules to do so. It evaluates human capital, institutional, and credentialist the…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2025)
This article explores a small number of African international students’ narratives on their identity work through work-integrated learning (WIL) in Chinese higher education. Applying a sociological use of the ‘possible selves’ concept to interview data, the findings show that individual participants…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2024)
This research examines conceptualisations of Chinese vocational education. The parallel routes of academic and vocational education sort students into either strand with standardised exams. However, the status of academic and vocational work has been established through a culture of Confucianism. In…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2023)
Peers may both promote conformity and discourage ambitious choices when students make educational decisions. Low socioeconomic status (SES) students may be more sensitive to outside influence than high SES students when making educational decisions. Considering the case of choosing between an academ…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2023)
This paper focuses on the perceptions of technical high school tutors in Mexico about students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in the context of global curriculum reforms and institutional hierarchies. Through two novel concepts in education, culture of poverty and cultural deficiency, the pape…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2021)
Current reforms in vocational education and training (VET) are characterised by a constant striving for quality assurance and improvement. To this end, a powerful reform network has emerged that shapes the subjectivation processes of teachers. Drawing on Foucault (1980), we term this complex formati…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2020)
While the scholarly work on the second generation of immigrants has scrutinised both high educational achievers and marginalised groups, less attention has been paid to those in between and their aspirations. In this article, we draw on interviews with 35 adolescents pursuing vocational education in…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2020)
Previous studies of citizenship preparation in upper secondary school, including studies on vocational programmes, have primarily focused on general subjects. Potential and actual roles of vocational subjects in this context have received little attention, so we have little knowledge of what is like…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2020)
This paper explores how nursing education both exemplifies the contradictions of neoliberalism alongside its seemingly all-encompassing influence. We conduct a feminist critical policy analysis to trace the histories of nursing as a feminised vocation located outside the academy, and how this is ref…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2020)
In this paper we provide a framework for conceptualising transitions from Vocational Education and Training (VET) programmes to Higher Education (HE), by bringing together Bourdieu’s and Bernstein’s theoretical approaches with the view to attend to the often side-lined epistemic and pedagogical para…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2020)
The influence of living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood on young people’s transitions from education to the labour market has not received much attention in past research. This study examines the extent to which social disorganisation, understood as the level of crime experienced in the neighbourho…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2019)
This project investigated the postsecondary education aspirations of 27 secondary school-aged students living in greater London, England and greater Boston, Massachusetts, USA. An innovative research design was implemented to support a technology-facilitated international focus group allowing for ex…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2019)
Situating in the different social, political and cultural contexts of schooling in China, which is more embedded in mixed neoliberal value, authoritarian state control and collective morality, we use a somewhat different theoretical angle to understand the process of ‘learning to labour’ and the rep…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2018)
There is growing international interest in young people’s post-compulsory education pathways. In contexts of ‘widening participation’ as university is increasingly ‘normalised’, how do young people choose alternative routes into training and employment? While in Britain apprenticeships are a key asp…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2018)
The present article analyzes the development of the ethnic gap—with respect to the attainment of vocational degrees—over the immigration cohorts 1960–2001 by examining how social integration indicators and general secondary school education may help to explain the trend. It was found that the gap be…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2017)
Little work on the significance and implications of decision-making has been undertaken since that led by Hodkinson in the 1990s, and the experiences of young people on vocational programmes and their reasons for undertaking them remain under-theorised and poorly understood. Drawing on two narrative…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2016)
This paper unpacks the meanings and implications of the mobility of international students in vocational education – an under-researched group in the field of international education. This four-year study found that transnational mobility is regarded as a resourceful vehicle to help international st…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2014)
This paper explores the layered transitional experiences of a semi-professional athlete named Jack (a pseudonym) between the fields of professional sport and further and higher education. Our analysis is framed by the quadripartite framework of structuration and focuses on Jack's 'in-situ' practices…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2013)
This paper uses Raymond Boudon's model of educational expansion to examine the relationship between education and social mobility, paying particular attention to post-compulsory education - an important site of social differentiation in England. The paper shows how Boudon focuses explicitly on the c…
Published:British Journal of Sociology of Education
(2013)
Strategies employed by middle-class families to ensure successful educational outcomes for their children have long been the focus of theoretical and empirical analysis in the United Kingdom and beyond. In austerity England, the issue of middle-class social reproduction through higher education incr…
